At one point in the 2012 presidential campaign , each of Mitt Romney 's tweets had to be approved by nearly two dozen aides in the lead-up to the Republican 's loss to President Barack Obama , a new study says .

The figure is included in a University of North Carolina study published Friday . The study cites Caitlin Checkett , Romney 's digital integration director , who says that each post -- on Twitter , Facebook , the campaign 's blog or elsewhere -- had to be approved by an ever-growing roster of the campaign 's operatives .

`` Towards the end of the campaign that was 22 individuals who had to approve it . ... The digital team unfortunately did not have the opportunity to think of things on their own and post them . ... The downfall of that of course is as fast as we are moving it can take a little bit of time to get that approval to happen , '' she says .

Romney 's digital director , Zac Moffatt , concurred , saying the campaign had `` the best tweets ever written by 17 people ... it was the best they all could agree on every single time . ''

That enough Romney aides to play a football game had to approve each tweet underscores major differences in approaches between Obama 's digitally-savvy campaign and the clunkier operations it defeated -- including Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary and Romney in 2012 .

The study 's author is Daniel Kreiss , an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina who researches political communication .

He wrote that `` in contrast to the Obama campaign , Romney 's digital team had to go through an extensive vetting process for all of its public communications , meaning that the temporal workflow of the campaign did not match the speed of social media . ''

Kreiss wrote that the Romney campaign 's digital team felt undermined by its lack of autonomy . By the campaign 's conclusion , he wrote , Romney staffers were repackaging press releases for use on social media because they knew that language had already been green-lighted .

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A new study says each Mitt Romney tweet had to be approved by 22 campaign staffers

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The study cites Caitlin Checkett , Romney 's digital integration director

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The study highlights the different approaches by the Romney and Obama campaigns in 2012